


Shifting Sands

by Desdimonda



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst and Feels, Feels, Gen, Intrspection, Kazekage Gaara (Naruto), Personal Growth, Personal Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26427355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desdimonda/pseuds/Desdimonda
Summary: A journey with Gaara through four different winters from when he takes the mantle as Kazekage, and how he grows into the role, and himself.----There’s always a fog hanging around the people of Suna when he walks by, clouding their hearts and heads. For some, it sticks, still refusing to budge as he walks by. But for others, he notices that it’s begun to dissipate, the grey swell, thinning. It’s not quite kindness in their eyes - but achange.Just like the cusp of seasons, where autumn falls, shedding the remainder of its blanket, coating a walkway for winter to approach, step by step.----Written for the zine - A Year of Naruto!
Relationships: Gaara & Uzumaki Naruto
Kudos: 15





	Shifting Sands

**1:**

Morning. It’s a word for other people - not Gaara. Many words don’t fit on his tongue. They’re stuck in his palms, marred with blood, with sand, ripped from Suna’s heart and home. There’s no distinction to the days - because there’s no sleep. As a baby, the consequences of his sleep had not yet been apparent. It wasn’t until he walked, talked, and could comprehend the world that looked the other way, did sleep become his enemy. 

But it all came down to the singular choice his father had made, that was _stuck_ inside him. The bijuu; Shukaku; the constant - both enemy, and friend. The only one he really ever had. Loss of sleep, appetite, loneliness - all of these were just _consequences_ of a choice, made by someone else. The rest - the blood, the death, the loneliness, the fear. His choice, right? Or another ripple of the shackles that hung from his neck, that clattered from his wrists.

Gaara touches the windowsill he sits on, speckled with sand and shards of stone. The stone is _so cold._ Winter is a whisper away, biding its time for the perfect moment to spread its weary, white wings across Suna, and shake. Like much in Gaara’s life, the seasons in Suna have very little balance. The sun bleaches the earth, scorching, cracking the path even as you walk; the wind carries the sand so fast, so high, if you listen carefully it’s a song. Then when the rain falls, you’re not quenched, but nearly _drowned._

Feet touch the ground softly as he slips off the windowsill, hearing the soft caw of the morning sandgrouse that nests nearby. It’s taken a liking to his rooftop. Gaara had always found it odd that it had nested here among people and not in the solitude of the arid plains where they usually called home. 

An anomaly, like him.

He watches it swoop low toward its nest, quietly thankful for the familiarity. 

Suna greets him with familiarity too, but a different tone. 

There’s always a fog hanging around the people of Suna when he walks by, clouding their hearts and heads. For some, it sticks, still refusing to budge as he walks by. But for others, he notices that it’s begun to dissipate, the grey swell, thinning. It’s not quite kindness in their eyes - but a _change._ Just like the cusp of seasons, where autumn falls, shedding the remainder of its blanket, coating a walkway for winter to approach, step by step. 

Gaara feels like he’s waiting for something else to approach, but he doesn’t know what. He’s taken to walking alone in the mornings, as if searching for it, the answer hidden in the grains of sand. Maybe it _was_ written there, but by the time he arrived, it had been washed away, disturbed by foot, by wind, not ready to be seen. Had someone else seen it, and thought it their answer to an unasked question?

“Morning, Gaara,” comes a quiet voice.

He sees a child from the academy rush past, his words waving before he dashes off, presumably getting in some morning training before school starts for the day. Quietly he’s impressed by his dedication. But the children of Suna were always raised and held to hopeful and high standards, many wanting to outmatch their predecessors, or simply, their previous day. 

It was a rigid regime. And rough. He wondered if many of them knew what it was like to still be children. 

_Not that I ever really knew._

He realises he’s stopped walking. He’s stuck, watching where the kid had run off, scaling one of the buildings, leaving behind a cloud.

Were they all really beginning to see _past_ what he was and what he’d done?

Gaara catches the eye of a young mother, child sleeping at her back. She says nothing and quickly looks away, her steps brisker as she wound a wide berth. Or was it just this one boy?

There was a lot that weighed his mind, making it hurt whether his eyes were open, or closed, but one thing weighed heavier than most lately - his penance. 

He wanted to give back for all he’d done.

_“It wasn’t all your fault-”_

-he could hear ringing in his ears, switching between Temari’s voice, Kankuro’s voice, then back to Naruto’s. A friend. Would that no longer be a word for everyone else, and finally be a word for him too? Naruto had become an ally, alongside all of the Leaf - but ever since he had a taste of friendship, he wanted _more._

Time, patience, those words rang off everyone’s tongues. He’d had time. He’d been patient. And it just made him insane. Now, he didn’t want to wait. Now, he wanted to do. 

There’d always been one person in the village that everyone respected, most loved, some even revered; they’d protected, given their all for every soul within the village’s walls, and lead with honour - he thought back to his father, his fingers tight against his palm _._ To take the mantle like father, now son - this could be his penance, and proof that he wasn’t there to fear anymore, but to...love.

He turns, heading to Temari’s, the morning air sharp against his skin.

**2:**

**__** _Tight, tighter, the fingers pressed against his throat. One by one. They were cold, unforgiving, and unfamiliar._

_Why were they unfamiliar. They should be familiar. Shouldn’t this be Shukaku’s mocking hand, twisting out the life of his subject and host, doing exactly what he’d promised he would when Gaara fell asleep - take control, and make Gaara lose._

_“We don’t want you.”_

_The voice isn’t familiar either. It isn’t Shukaku’s manic malice. It’s human. A Suna Shinobi, the marked headband shining beneath the moonlight, bright, blinding._

_“You should have stayed dead, that day.”_

_Her fingers tighten. He tries to summon his sand, but it denies him, slipping through his fingers to pool on the floor, through the floor, away to a graspless void that falls and slips away, like his breath-_

Gaara rips off his sheets as he wakes, taking a cold, crisp breath, a mercy against his throat - a throat he touches, as if to make sure it’s still there. Intact. All he can feel is the beat of his heart, so loud as if it wants to remind Gaara that yes, yes he’s alive, even if he shouldn’t be.

Beads of sweat drip, drip down his skin. He wipes his forehead, glancing at the clock. 

2:27am.

Almost three hours. It’s getting better. 

Kicking off the rest of his sheets, Gaara stands, shedding any remainder of sleep that was left. It was tarnished now. And the harder he tried to pull it back, the worse the terrors were that followed. He’d learned to give in, and do something else. But finding that something else was difficult. Spending most of your life consumed by a singular being, hating everything, everyone, and the most - yourself - there’d been little time to find things he _liked._

Pulling on a shirt, he slides the door to his balcony, shivering at the chill that wipes away his sweat. Breathing deeply, it brushes his lungs, vanquishing the ghost of his dream that wants to linger. He touches his neck again, pressing lightly. 

It’s not real.

He sits on the cold stone in-front of his small array of cacti and succulents, picking up a small pair of clippers.

He liked _this._

Temari had given him his first succulent not long after he’d said he wanted to become Kazekage. She’d found him one evening tending to her own small collection, and he looked - she said - at peace. He didn’t really understand at the time how that felt, but the more he sat out here with them, the more he tended to them and watched them flourish, and beneath his hand, he thought he finally began to understand care.

Once Shukaku was gone he thought he’d know peace, but their presence was just replaced with a different chaos.

Absence. 

For the first time since birth, Gaara was alone. His mind, his will, was singularly _his_. That itself should have settled his shaky heart, but he couldn’t begin to understand how to stitch together the void that had been left behind. He was never meant to know how it felt - he was meant to be dead.

Gaara twists a line of sand between his fingers, watching the fine grains wash over his skin. The sand still obeyed his every call, and if he listened, he could feel its strength flow beneath his skin like the pulse of his blood. Maybe he’d kept enough of what made him, not what broke him.

He clips away a heavy chunk of a succulent so it doesn’t tip over, wide and thick, tinged with a thin layer of frost. His fingers wipe it away. Snow. Gaara looks up to the sky, expecting to see a swathe of a million stars looking down as he sits alone. But instead he sees a thick blanket of grey, of white clouds, dense enough that he feels he could pull them apart if he could touch. 

Snow falls onto his nose as he looks up. Then more. He holds up a hand, watching the scattered flakes fall onto his palm. 

He looks back into his room, remembering the blink of his clock. 

It was the first day of winter.

Gaara brushes off the snow that’s gathered on his succulents, but soon realises it’s futile as the snow begins to fall heavier, a swathe of white bringing a delicate hush across the desert. The silence echoes the absence he’s tried to abide with since he took his renewed breaths. So he just sits and listens, to nothing.

He wonders if he should go back inside, the snow settling on his shoulders and hair, clinging softly to the red tips. But he doesn’t. He just lifts his clippers again and begins to tend to his succulents, one by one. 

The snow means nothing to them. It’s just another element, another day. He looks beyond the black railings of his balcony, out beyond the high vantage of his home, out over his people, his friends, his family. The desert persists. Just like the succulents, it survives anything. 

He draws a line through the snow speckled sand at his feet.

He trusts the desert, maybe it’s time to trust himself the same.

**3:**

Heavy lids open as Gaara stretches lazily across his bed, kicking off a cushion, the sheets twisting between bare legs, licked by the cold morning air. Was it still morning? It felt late. It was noisier sometimes when he woke now. He hears voices outside, the hum of the village as it lived and breathed around him.

10:17

It _was_ late. He touches the alarm clock, tracing the numbers with a faint smile. 

It had taken years to even reach the prospect of sleeping past three, four hours. But a lie-in? He glances to the side and watches the sunlight stream in through the twisting curtains, stretching an arm across the mattress, trying to sink further into the feeling he wants to hold on to. Because maybe this was a one time offer; maybe this was the first and last. 

Whatever it was, it was _good._

It was also five years to the day of his appointment as Kazekage. Five years of trust and love, five years of discovering who’d lain beneath the rage and overbearing presence of Shukaku. But, it wasn’t all Shukaku who moulded his downfall. Fear of him had been the sharpest tool, for it had turned to hate - and those who cut the deepest were those who were closest and meant to love him. But love, for him, was something that had been skewed from the beginning. Even now, the threads of it were still being unwound day to day, heart to heart. 

But it was clearer. When he reached out, pulling fingers through threads, the resistance was small, the knots breaking free beneath his touch, dissolving to merge with his grains of sand.

A door opens in the distance. He recognises the footsteps. She doesn’t bother knocking and steps inside, thin eyebrows raised when she sees Gaara still sprawled on his bed and not perched by his desk, or sitting quietly on the balcony, lost in himself. 

“Are you just going to bed?” Temari asks, striding inside, unashamed, and pushing aside the curtains, the cool morning air quickly dissipating as the sun rises higher. Despite it being mid winter, the sun still has bite in the desert.

“You ask me that, yet you open my curtains?” says Gaara as he keeps himself wrapped in his sheets. Temari cared little for privacy. 

Temari pauses, curtain half drawn, and turns to Gaara. “You’re just up?”

“Yeah…”

“When did you go to bed?” 

It’s like an interrogation. Despite being the Kazekage, it still feels like her word is law. Sometimes, Gaara likes it. It’s a familiarity that’s kept - that helped ground him while everything else changed. He often wondered if she knew, and that’s why she did it.

Gaara shrugs at her question, but tries to recall. He doesn’t really remember. Often his sleeping schedule is regimented, the time burned onto his eyes as he stares at the clock, time blinking away, away. 

“Two I think?”

Temari finishes opening the curtain and smirks. “Well, well,” she says, opening the balcony door.

“Can I get dressed first?” he interrupts.

Temari rolls her eyes and turns around after throwing him his robe. “You slept in. That’s a first.”

Gaara smiles as he slides on his robe, enjoying the cold floor against his toes. “I hope it’s not a last.”

“Lie-ins are overrated.”

“You’ve been around Shikamaru too much,” he says, halting the cushion she throws at him with a small wall of sand.

“Cheat.”

Gaara waves the sand back into his gourd that’s propped up nearby. “ _Advantage_.”

“Anyway. Everyone will be arriving soon, don’t forget,” she says as she begins to leave his bedroom. Temari pauses at his doorway, then turns. “But...take your time. Enjoy your lazy morning.” And she leaves, pulling the sliding door shut.

**4:**

“Does it ever snow here in winter?” asks Sakura as she leans out the window, looking down upon Suna, bathed in a bare sky, but for the stars and the slither of a new moon.

“Sometimes,” drawls Kankuro from the floor, his eyes closed as he eats a handful of chips, piled onto his chest. “It can be the coldest place in the world here - as well as the hottest.”

Gaara rises from his knees and steadies the hot pot of tea, perfectly brewed, and begins to top off everyone’s cup, quietly, while they talk, eat, walk. He offers another to Sakura as she reclines back on his chaise, closing the window with a shiver. 

“We should be playing hostess, since this celebration is for you,” Sakura says, sipping the rose green tea.

“You’re my guests.” He pauses, looking from Lee and Naruto crowded around his expanded collection of succulents and cacti that he’s had to get a second table for them alone. Some sit on the floor, some on the windowsill and beyond, meeting his outdoor collection in their winter bloom. 

“Hey look bushy brows, this one looks just like you. Big, green and dark bits for your brows,” Naruto says with a staggered laugh as he lifts up the succulent to Lee’s face. 

“Succulents are strong, hardy and beautiful plants - I am honoured to be compared to one!”

Naruto raises a brow. Then just laughs. 

“Wanna keep the noise down,” chimes Shikamaru as he plucks a chip from Kankuro’s chest, lying at his side.

“Hey. I’m not your personal bag of chips,” says Kankuro as he bats away Shikamaru’s hand.

“No. But you’re my soon to be brother-in-law so be nice to me-.”

Kankuro snorts. “And why am I the one that’s gotta be nice?”

Ino leans down and takes a handful of chips from Kankuro’s chest. “Because we all know he’s an asshole.”

Gaara turns back to Sakura, blinking away his stupor. “You’re my guests - and my friends.”

“And I’m thirsty.” Temari holds out her empty cup before Gaara and he stares for a moment too long for her, before she simply takes the teapot from his hand and sits herself next to Sakura. “Go - shoo. Mingle. It’s your party, tiny brother.”

“You only look taller because of your hair.” Gaara leaves, and approaches Naruto who now stands alone by his collection of plants, picking them up one by one.

“Oh hey, Gaara. Love the plants! This one’s got your hair - or my hair more I guess,” says Naruto with a laugh as he holds it up between their faces, gently prodding the elongated leaves. “You really love your plants, huh.”

He supposes he did.

_‘Find something you like.’_ And he had, little by little. It had helped find him, too. It had started with one that Temari had given him years ago, before becoming Kazekage - and like their petals, it had blossomed into a love. Something gentle tended to beneath his hand, nurtured by his nature - a nature that once destroyed, now gave life.

A life that once hated, now loved.

His love had started small too, one at a time. Sibling by sibling, he began to relearn who they were alongside himself. Then one friend became two, then more, then - he looked up and around his living room - then, there was this. 

Gaara turns back to Naruto - his first friend, the one who’d helped him remember _himself._ He picks up a succulent in bloom, a small orange flower at its centre above a palm sized spread of flat, purple tipped leaves.

“I want you to have this.” He holds it up to Naruto who is engrossed in a cactus, so close to pricking one of its needles, the focus in his eyes debating whether he should, or shouldn’t.

“Huh?” Naruto quips a brow, confused. “But I didn’t even get you anything. Unless you count the instant ramen I filled your cupboard with.”

Gaara smiles. “We both know that’s for you when you visit.”

Naruto giggles, scratching his head. “But your favourite flavour is there too!”

Gaara holds the plant. Naruto stares. “Take it.”

“But why?”

“It reminds me of you. The bright orange flower is loud and garish, and stands out among all the rest,” he says as Naruto takes it. “And promise me you’ll put it on your desk when you become Hokage.”

“Hah!” Naruto beams at Gaara, then at the succulent. “It’ll be the first thing I put on my desk.” He pauses, scratching his head. “But uh…how do you look after it?”

Gaara motions for Naruto to follow outside to the balcony. He kneels before his array of plants, picking up his clippers and waiting for Naruto to join, the succulent clutched tightly in his hand.


End file.
